Halfway point
About life, death and time
We are on the verge of the year 2020. As I tend to do by this time of the year, I start thinking about the following one. What do I want to do? What do I want to achieve? What ideas I’d like to develop and projects give my time to? All always aimed towards the goal of life fulfilment, personal accomplishment and joy.
This year though, it was slightly different, during this thinking I also realised and factored in a significant variable that I never considered in this way before. Time.
Next year I’ll turn 35, and although I continue to feel the same, if not stronger, the passing of time is inclement and undeniable and ageing unstoppable.
Turning 35 means that, if my life expectancy is 70 years, next year I will be reaching the halfway point of my life. 50%. Which fundamentally means that I only have left another 35 years to do and achieve all I want to, to live.
That itself generates so many feelings and emotions, one after the other.
It is scary, because no matter how mindful you think you are about life and mortality, which I try to be an openly discuss without hesitation, fear or taboo, the factual realisation of how much time left you might have, becomes immediately intimidating.
It gives you a context that you never had before. It provides a (rough) deadline. Because despite our awareness of life’s finality, not having an exact date, and the initial notion of abundance we perceived through youth, make us treat it as an endless pursuit; almost giving it for granted at times.
It is its continuous extinguishment what eventually makes us realise this is not the case as less and less time starts to be available to us.
This is by no means a morbid ode about the end of life, nor it is a cry of desperation. On the contrary, it is a clear realisation of life as it is and what it is left of it. It is the snapshot of an empty timeline with an estimated finish line.
We go through life wondering what would be next. We get paralysed about decisions that we are not sure if it would be safe to make. About risk, about opinions.
35 years. I don’t think is too much time to be really honest. When you start thinking about your future and your life taking into account the time you might have left, perspective drastically changes and it allows you to think differently about life’s biggest decisions. About the things holding you back.
You realise how much time has been wasted on silly things, how many times have been waited for the right moment when in reality there’s no such and thing.
It is scary, of course it is. Steve Jobs wonderfully said it on his seminal commencement speech at Stanford University more than 10 years ago:
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.”
It is also an invitation, almost an alert, to stop thinking, wishing and wondering and start acting and deciding. To stop postponing and to let go. To be pragmatic and realistic. To be mindful, to be present.
Try, play, experiment, figure it out, take the risk. Time is going to pass anyway.
“Your time is limited” — Steve Jobs
